Abroad, on the other hand, the development of fire-arms was actually encouraged and skill in their use patronised. The rivalry which already existed with bow and arrow was extended to the new medium, and in Sweden and Switzerland, Germany and France, shooting competitions continued in vogue and proficiency with musket and arquebus was honoured and substantially rewarded. In Switzerland and Southern Germany especially, shooting was very popular. The character of the people, their skill in making delicate mechanisms, the nature of the country, all tended to promote an interest in musketry which did not exist among our own people. As a result England has little to claim in the early stages of the development of portable fire-arms. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries smooth-bore weapons firing spherical lead balls were the only kind known and used. But in the early part of the sixteenth century a development took place which was to prove of the first importance to fire-arms; which was to make the primitive weapon in the course of time “the most beautiful, and at the same time the most deadly instrument of warfare ever devised by the ingenuity of man.” The value of rifling was discovered. How, when, or where this discovery was first made, appears to have defied the researches of investigators. As to the manner in which the development took place and the effects which it was intended to produce by its means there is an assortment of evidence; and this is so various and so interesting as bearing on the action of the rifle and its evolution, that we reproduce it in some detail. On one point there appears to be small doubt: _The earliest rifling had no twist in it_. “It seems to have been generally accepted by writers on the subject,” says the author of _The Book of the Rifle_, “that the earliest barrels had straight grooves, the object of which was to give a space into which the fouling of previous shots might stow itself without obstructing the process of loading with a well-fitting ball, and that spiral grooving was merely an accidental variation of this, afterwards found to possess special advantages.” Nevertheless, he himself inclines to the opinion that the straight groove was not necessarily a prior form of the spiral. The collections in museums contain examples of spiral grooving older than the oldest straight-grooved barrels. In any case, it is antecedently more probable, he considers, that the spiral grooving was not a variation of the straight groove, but that it was “a deliberate attempt to find a means of giving to the bullet the spiral spin which was well known as having a steadying effect on the javelin, or on the arrow or bolt discharged from the bow.”[112]